A leading UK commercial property consultancy headquartered in Leeds is transforming the service it offers to customers with a pioneering artificial intelligence project, a first for the company.

With more of its business moving online because of the pandemic, the expanding Eddisons Group is now using advanced AI to join up its understanding of customers’ behaviours, both online and offline, and help them realise the true value of their properties, businesses and assets faster.

James Foster, Finance and Operations Partner at Eddisons, explains the reasons behind the new strategy: “We’ve grown significantly in recent years, acquiring HNG Chartered Surveyors earlier this year in addition to Ernest Wilson and Barker Storey Matthews in 2019. As a result of our expanding offer and Covid accelerating the necessity for our company to move from being digitally-focused to digital-first, we needed to aggregate all of the data sets we hold across our different companies into one single customer view. It’s allowing us to create the most targeted customer segmentations we’ve ever had, and the potential commercial benefit across our group of companies is huge.”

Eddisons has appointed Third Foundation, a specialist data and machine learning company, to create a company-wide AI-programme that will deliver a level of understanding about its clients and their behaviours across multiple touch points throughout the entire life cycle of that relationship. Michael Ward, CEO of Third Foundation, explains: “Eddisons is breaking new ground in their space by connecting data from both online and offline interactions, across multiple platforms and brands, into a single intelligence layer in the cloud. With hundreds of thousands of interactions and events every month, there is an opportunity to predict what customers want and assign human capital to it, at that moment. This means eliminating wasteful interaction with customers that neither side wants, making space for more relevant interactions with customers in the moments that truly matter.

“As the pandemic has expedited digital transformation, we want to equip businesses with the tools to augment what humans are capable of in their working lives, as opposed to replacing humans with tech - this is a really important vision for us, which Eddisons also shares.”

Third Foundation is on a mission to create Time to Think, freeing people from the mundane so they can focus on the transformational. It was launched in 2019 and is at the forefront of implementing cloud-based, data transformation projects using AI that few companies have seen previously.